In the interest of moving along the discussions of the two ongoing proposals (Foundation and Labs), we wanted to ask a set of questions that we’d like to have answered in public.

In the following set of questions, a "developer" will refer specifically to a developer or tester contributing to any of the core parts of catapult (sdks, REST api, and/or catapult cpp server). This intentionally excludes other developers that might be building websites or supporting services.

Section 1 - Road to Launching Catapult

Please clarify to the community the number of developers currently on your team and the number that will be hired by your plan prior to July 1st. What percentage of your headcount and budget is allocated to these positions?

Please share your team’s experiences with managing and hiring developers. How likely is it that you’ll be able to fulfill hiring goals and create a good working environment?

Please describe the main contributions your current team has made to Catapult readiness to date.

Would you be open to a professionally managed, but independent, team of developers to make the push towards Catapult?

Section 2 - Finances and Oversight

Please clarify your current financial situation. Is your team in debt, if so how much?

What was the headcount of your team in 2018 and how does it compare to current headcount and projected headcount at end of 2019?

What will happen if your team does not get all desired funding? Are there variations of your proposal that could work at lower funding levels? Would you consider working with one of the other team(s) who have made a successful proposal?

How much XEM will your proposal require at the current (0.04), 4x below (0.01), 4x above (0.16) XEM prices?

Please explain details of the independent oversight you will have in place to evaluate your performance.

How are you planning to adapt to changing market conditions and evolving priorities with an annual funding cycle? Would it be beneficial to be more agile and request funding from an independent oversight committee more regularly (e.g. monthly or quarterly)?

Section 3 - Philosophy

What is your vision for NEM and how do you hope to achieve it?

What are your values?

Where do you see your organization in 2 years? 5 years?

Additionally, we should stress that the PMC structure set up for catapult is a mechanism for managing the open source development and project direction. Any funding decisions are completely orthogonal to PMC contributions.

Finally, we should note that two types of funds were created in the nemesis block:

Community Funds: These funds are owned by the community and deployed with a simple community PoI vote. In the past, some questionable projects have been funded in this manner, and NEM Ventures was created to perform more due diligence over candidate investments. Just because these funds are harder to obtain, does not mean it’s a free for all for the other funds.

Ecosystem/ Development Funds: These funds are owned by early team members to deploy as they see fit to help NEM. Community PoI vote for the deployment of these funds is non-binding. It might be helpful to form a more structured process for the deployment of these funds.

In the following set of questions, a “developer” will refer specifically to a developer or tester contributing to any of the core parts of catapult (sdks, REST api, and/or catapult cpp server). This intentionally excludes other developers that might be building websites or supporting services.

Section 1 - Road to Launching Catapult

Please clarify to the community the number of developers currently on your team and the number that will be hired by your plan prior to July 1st. What percentage of your headcount and budget is allocated to these positions?

Please share your team’s experiences with managing and hiring developers. How likely is it that you’ll be able to fulfill hiring goals and create a good working environment?

Please describe the main contributions your current team has made to Catapult readiness to date.

Would you be open to a professionally managed, but independent, team of developers to make the push towards Catapult?

Section 2 - Finances and Oversight

Please clarify your current financial situation. Is your team in debt, if so how much?

What was the headcount of your team in 2018 and how does it compare to current headcount and projected headcount at end of 2019?

What will happen if your team does not get all desired funding? Are there variations of your proposal that could work at lower funding levels? Would you consider working with one of the other team(s) who have made a successful proposal?

How much XEM will your proposal require at the current (0.04), 4x below (0.01), 4x above (0.16) XEM prices?

Please explain details of the independent oversight you will have in place to evaluate your performance.

How are you planning to adapt to changing market conditions and evolving priorities with an annual funding cycle? Would it be beneficial to be more agile and request funding from an independent oversight committee more regularly (e.g. monthly or quarterly)?

Section 3 - Philosophy

What is your vision for NEM and how do you hope to achieve it?

What are your values?

Where do you see your organization in 2 years? 5 years?

Additionally, we should stress that the PMC structure set up for catapult is a mechanism for managing the open source development and project direction. Any funding decisions are completely orthogonal to PMC contributions.

Finally, we should note that two types of funds were created in the nemesis block:

Community Funds: These funds are owned by the community and deployed with a simple community PoI vote. In the past, some questionable projects have been funded in this manner, and NEM Ventures was created to perform more due diligence over candidate investments. Just because these funds are harder to obtain, does not mean it’s a free for all for the other funds.

Ecosystem/ Development Funds: These funds are owned by early team members to deploy as they see fit to help NEM. Community PoI vote for the deployment of these funds is non-binding. It might be helpful to form a more structured process for the deployment of these funds.

Thanks in advance for your responses,

Great questions – thanks for this. We’ll reply later today once we run the answer by all the Council and ExCo. (It’s in the middle of the night for some.)

I so want to meet the devs one day in person.
You all are so community driven its unbelievable. You all have full time jobs, code NEMv1 and NEMv2 part time and you even take the time to formulated solid questions…
I don’t know how you do all this day in and day out, but well done and thank you !

Please clarify to the community the number of developers currently on your team and the number that will be hired by your plan prior to July 1st. What percentage of your headcount and budget is allocated to these positions?

Currently, as NEM Europe, we have 3.4 FTE (+1 in on-boarding) developers and testers contributing to crucial parts of Catapult. In total, we have 6.4 FTE technical staff (one is part-time).

Prior to July 1st, we will have 9.4 FTE developers and testers contributing to crucial parts of Catapult as well as 1 CTO steering them. In total, we will have 24.35 FTE staff, of which 15.9 are technical staff. By the end of 2019, we will have 16.4 FTE developers and testers contributing to crucial parts of Catapult, and 22.9 FTE technical staff in total.

Please share your team’s experiences with managing and hiring developers. How likely is it that you’ll be able to fulfil hiring goals and create a good working environment?

During the creation of our detailed business plan, we were mindful about setting realistic objectives for the hiring plan. Finding the right talent for Q2 (which has the highest forecasted team growth ) will be challenging - as hiring always is - but we are confident it can be achieved. More info about the positions we have foreseen can be found here.

Over the past year, we have learned a lot about recruiting and managing a distributed team. There are still many areas that can be improved and we are currently adapting to the new project management structure through the PMC. We have an experienced Developer Manager advising us in this process.

Based on his input we have provisioned funds for recruitment-related expenses (as part of PERSONNEL AND RELATED EXPENSES category in our budget). This takes into account that some positions will require the involvement of recruiters in order to find and assess suitable candidates. Ideally, the actual expenses will be lower than foreseen but realistically we would be close to what is provisioned in order to meet the hiring goals.

An integral part of our plan is to ensure a good working environment for our team. This means providing people with the (software) tools they need in order to do their job properly. We have also provisioned budget for personal development and team building sessions (combined with strategic group sessions). Personal development is crucial to ensure staff retention, and given the remote setup, it is important to get together with the team once in a while.

Please describe the main contributions your current team has made to Catapult readiness to date.

Would you be open to a professionally managed, but independent, team of developers to make the push towards Catapult?

First and foremost, we want to see the technology move forward. Whoever makes that happen is irrelevant. With the technical management of the project through the PMC, multiple stakeholders can jointly make the push towards Catapult. Many successful open source projects are using this setup and we genuinely believe NEM will become another success story.

Our business plan has a clear focus and approach to drive the adoption of Catapult. We are customer demand facing through NEMsp which allows us to gather industry requirements. Being at the forefront of pushing the technology and at the forefront of developing the technology will strengthen the Catapult offering for real-world adoption.

Imperative and vital to seeing our technology widely used is by “touching” the people who can utilise its benefits. This includes showing them NEM is the right choice over other protocols, and this can only be done “facing customers”, and meeting the needs of the masses with NEM technology.

Section 2 - Finances and Oversight

Please clarify your current financial situation. Is your team in debt, if so how much?

In fact, I just came back from a meeting with our (NEM Europe entity) accountant. Some minor final corrections and additions have to be made to the accounts in order to close the accounting year but we will be able to get that sorted out in the coming days. Since the NEM Europe entity was incorporated late 2017 it will be an extended accounting year that spans from incorporation until the end of 2018.

Although, I cannot state final numbers; the entity will have generated minor revenue.

Over the past couple of months, there were some liquidity issues because of problems with adding new signatories to the Singapore bank. This resulted in a delayed payment from NEM Foundation to NEM Europe. As the entity was not supposed to have a large profit since this would be taxed, it also means that the entity did not have a cash buffer. This resulted in some delayed payments to suppliers (mainly staff). We just received another payment from NEM Foundation to cover for services that were invoiced in Jan and early Feb. This means that we should be able to make up for the delayed payments by the end of this month.

So the short answer is that we do not have any debt.

What was the headcount of your team in 2018 and how does it compare to current headcount and projected headcount at end of 2019?

Our current headcount is 12.35 FTE (total of 11 full time and 3 part time staff members). Maximum headcount in 2018 was 13 FTE.

Projected headcount for the end of 2019 is just over 33 FTE.

What will happen if your team does not get all desired funding? Are there variations of your proposal that could work at lower funding levels? Would you consider working with one of the other team(s) who have made a successful proposal?

First of all, I would like to emphasise how we prepared for this proposal. As described in our business plan, the budget that is provided there will be the absolute maximum spent for 2019 - we have taken great care to be cautious. This means that this is the funding that is required in order for us to be confident in achieving our objectives as set forth in the plan. We are actually planning to use fewer funds than what is budgeted for.

The approach to creating the budget was to find the best possible compromise between a light and agile approach, being able to make tangible contributions to the development of Catapult, and being realistic about becoming self-sustaining down the line.

We are confident our business plan reflects that absolutely every effort was made, and all measures were taken to ensure our activities benefit the NEM project in as many ways as possible within our scope.

For profit activities are actually not just with the intention to become sustainable. All planned for-profit activities will also help improve Catapult or speed up growing the ecosystem. For this reason, we believe that reducing the budget would likely negatively affect the balance in our setup. If strictly necessary to reduce budget requirements we would rather opt for slower team growth than a reduction in scope.

Dependency on another entity who has made a successful proposal is not the objective of the NEM Labs proposal. Any strong ecosystem consists of many independent purpose driven entities that solve specific problems for the ecosystem. This is what we are proposing: NEM Labs; an independent, global, technology-focused entity. However, we are looking forward to collaboration with other entities (Example: collaboration between NEM Foundation & NEM Labs).

How much XEM will your proposal require at the current (0.04), 4x below (0.01), 4x above (0.16) XEM prices?

All of our expenses are locked to FIAT rates so the required budget does not change when the price of XEM goes up or down. That being said, if the XEM price went down, we could revise the hiring plan which will ultimately delay objectives. On the other hand, seeing an increased price will not result in higher expenses. The governance structure we have laid out ensures that we can only spend what has been agreed with the community which is linked to the budget in FIAT.

Current rate (0.04$): 81 750 000 XEM

4x below current rate (0.01$): 327 000 000 XEM

4x above current rate (0.16$): 20 437 500 XEM

As mentioned in our business plan, it is more likely for the XEM price to go up rather than down. That is why we have included a budget that extends through the entire year of 2020.

Please explain details of the independent oversight you will have in place to evaluate your performance.

We will have an independent CLG (Company Limited by Guarantee) consisting of long-standing community members, similar to the structure that was set up for NEM Ventures. This CLG will have budgetary oversight over NEM Labs.

This too is an important part of our proposal. Accountability to the community is important. We are doing this with the benefit of the NEM project in mind. Having a legal structure where NEM Labs is accountable to a group of independent community representatives will provide the community with peace of mind that funds will be used as per the proposal they voted for.

How are you planning to adapt to changing market conditions and evolving priorities with an annual funding cycle? Would it be beneficial to be more agile and request funding from an independent oversight committee more regularly (e.g. monthly or quarterly)?

We believe shorter cycles are favourable to adapt to changing market conditions. At the same time, long-term stability is required to attract competent staff. This is why we propose 12 months funding with a quarterly budget release by the independent CLG that controls NEM Labs.

Section 3 - Philosophy

What is your vision for NEM and how do you hope to achieve it?

Vision:

We believe that blockchain technology:

empowers people to regain control over their data and digital identity.

allows companies to simplify complex processes enabling them to build innovative applications that have a positive impact on society.

Mission:

We focus on three key pillars to make adoption of this great technology happen. In order of importance these are:

Open Source Contribution to Improve Catapult

Catapult Framework to Make NEM Accessible

NEMsp Network to Drive Adoption

What are your values?

Transparency: We are transparent and accountable towards the NEM community.

Collaboration: We are inclusive and involve the global NEM community.

Integrity: We prioritise the benefit of the NEM project over personal benefit. We have strong principles and we are 100% committed to NEM.

Focus: Focus allows us to translate our plan into achievements.

Gratitude: We show gratitude for the technology, open source code and the NEM community which is the reason for the existence of our team. We view it as our duty to give back through our achievements.

Continuous Improvement: We strive for perfection. We believe there is always room for improvement and are continuously working on making this happen.

Reflection: We listen and reflect before seeking to be understood.

Where do you see your organization in 2 years? 5 years?

Two Years

In two years, we will have fully rolled out our three pillars:

Open Source Contribution to Improve Catapult

18 NEM Labs PMC committers contributing to Catapult

Working on crucial parts of Catapult

Incorporating industry feedback to strengthen the Catapult offering

Grow the open source developer community through engagement

Catapult Framework to Make NEM Accessible

Reduce the time of onboarding to less than 10 minutes

Standard Practices

Examples & Showcases

Solutions to Industry Problem Statements

Clickable Demos

Prototyping tools

NEMsp Network to Drive Adoption

NEMsp Academy Portal

NEMsp Marketplace

100 global certified NEMsp

Further, we will have built a passionate team and an organization we can all be proud of.

Five Years

In five years, we will have made distinct progress towards achieving our vision. This means it will be crucial to achieve our objectives as outlined in our mission. At that point in time, we believe that NEM technology will have empowered people to regain control over their data and digital identity. We will have aligned NEM technology with market needs based on industry experience, resulting in companies building innovative applications that have a positive impact on society.

We appreciate your questions and we have placed considerable thought into this, thank you for your patience. Responses below:

Section 1 - Road to Launching Catapult

1. Please clarify to the community the number of developers currently on your team and the number that will be hired by your plan prior to July 1st. What percentage of your headcount and budget is allocated to these positions?

We estimate a total combined technology and development staff (both programmers and direct support) to be ~21 FTE (Full Time Employees) out of 54 FTE of our proposed headcount in the proposal (technology and product team). This is a total of 39% in headcount and 40.3% in budget allocation.

If developers contributing to budgeted projects are included, this adds a ~20 developers and project managers (2-3 project for up to 7 projects) excluding developers who may be claiming bounties.

Conclusion: this would mean there could be over 40 devs and team members (FTE and devs from projects) by July 1st.

Note: We included the Product Management team in our answer as they directly support the effectiveness of developers with scheduling, planning, communications, contract management, and time management. Other positions in the budget also have a core focus on promoting and supporting Catapult adoption. Link here to a list of our current tech talent.

2. Please share your team’s experiences with managing and hiring developers. How likely is it that you’ll be able to fulfill hiring goals and create a good working environment?

The question can be answered in 3 parts:

Team experience in managing and hiring developers

Collectively, our team has at least two decades of experience across B2B, B2C and various dev studios. Our team members have led companies as entrepreneurs, CTO, co-founder, project lead and are able to meet the leadership demands in managing and hiring developers.

How likely are we to fulfill our hiring goals?

Likely. Since NEM Foundation started, we have come across good talent and passion for NEM tech both internal and through external third party alliances. We have a shortlist of talent to employ (upon funding approval) and will be engaging with external partners though the service provider model. Groundwork has been laid and we expect to complete most of our hiring goals to support the development of Catapult by the end of Q2 2019.

How do we create a good working environment?

With the new structure, collaboration and continuous improvement are key. Having the right proportion of senior to junior team members will ensure the NEM Foundation has a defined direction and delivers code/projects at optimal speed. Our priority upon funding approval will be to hire a seasoned CTO and bring in the appropriate mix of technical talent.

Also, the Product Management team will directly support the effectiveness of developers with scheduling, planning, communications, contract management, and time management. This will help maintain a good and productive working environment for all.

3. Please describe the main contributions your current team has made to Catapult readiness to date.

All current Catapult contributions to date have been completely funded and supported by the NEM Foundation including app development, training, documentation, marketing/promotions, and weekly working groups since early 2018.

*The Center of Excellence (CoE) is a global initiative started in 2018 to centralize the NF’s development and contributions to Catapult. The CoE has been led by Kristof Van de Reck (under NEM Europe’s budget due to lack of designated budget being assigned to CoE.) Financial support for the CoE and NEM Europe has continued by the NF with the most recent funding of 3M XEM on 11 Feb 2019. It is undecided which EU staff may remain with the NEM Foundation or move to a new entity if funded.

4. Would you be open to a professionally managed, but independent, team of developers to make the push towards Catapult?

Yes. We want to see Catapult succeed.

Note: As far as professionally managed teams go, we are happy to work with them and hire them. We believe some pre-existing teams and long-established teams are better suited for some working projects and tasks and it is better to lean on their experience and existing toolsets than try to build everything ourselves from the ground up. Furthermore, hiring these teams helps to expand awareness of NEM outside of our bubble.

Section 2 - Finances and Oversight

1. Please clarify your current financial situation. Is your team in debt, if so how much?

Yes, our team will be in debt once February expenses are paid. Our current funding situation as of February 12, 2019 is as follows:

Note: As of early January 2019, we realized after an audit that there were too few funds to sustain Foundation operations for the long term and therefore some areas of operations were suspended and all staff notified. We began the process of conducting global redundancy (suspension of services) of staff until a refresh of operational funding is secured but funds have been insufficient. There is not enough funding left to properly shut down NEM Foundation much less pay salaries for everyone in February.

2. What was the headcount of your team in 2018 and how does it compare to current headcount and projected headcount at end of 2019?

We had 150 employees in 2018 and are projected to have ~54 employees (both fulltime and consultant) in 2019. We intend to keep the headcount low and work with partners (mostly development firms) who can support the delivery of our objectives.

What will happen if your team does not get all the desired funding? Are there variations of your proposal that could work at lower funding levels? Would you consider working with one of the other team(s) who have made a successful proposal?

If funding is not achieved, we will use all remaining funds to pay off liabilities, minimise debts and proceed to close the Foundation. The community will have to self-organise on the management of social media, partnerships, onboarding exchanges, managing complex global compliance issues, compiling case studies, commercialisation and sustainability of the NEM blockchain technology platform. The short-term and long-term impact on NEM of such a scenario is difficult to predict.

There could be variations with lower funding levels but this will further delay our ability to execute and hamper progression plans. Due to factors outside our control, the Foundation does not have enough funding to go past 28 February 2019

3. Would you consider working with one of the other team(s) who have made a successful proposal?

We are responding on the assumption that currently the only team with a live proposal that may be successful is NEM Labs.

If funding is not approved for our proposal, we cannot work with NEM Labs unless there is funding to support the teams in NEM Foundation to work with NEM Labs.

Note: NEM Foundation is currently still supporting the NEM EU team (~15 people), most are behind the proposal for NEM Labs. We value the contributions of their developers and are proud to have funded their development in the past. If they are not funded and we are, we will look to retain their developers with their current pay structure and working environment maintained. This includes Rest API, SDK, and documentation devs. In fact, we have budgeted line items in our budget called “ 2nd layer devs (Like API server, Cat buffer, ect)” and another called “Documentation”, and another for “SDKs” that can be used to pay for their expenses if it comes to that, and if it doesn’t, we can hire additional devs to help support them and make sure Catapult is launched faster. Furthermore if they are successful, the NEM Foundation would still like to work with them to collaborate on different aspects of the NEM ecosystem. We are in support of NEM EU and their proposal for NEM Labs.

3. How much XEM will your proposal require at the current (0.04), 4x below (0.01), 4x above (0.16) XEM prices?

If XEM stays at current (0.04) - we will maintain the proposal activation and initiate hiring as planned.

If XEM goes 4x below (0.01) - we will be hiring and spending conservatively at first, especially for some of the larger and non-critical projects like lightning and apps, but instead focus initially on SDKs, tools, and documentation

If XEM goes 4x above (0.16) - we will ensure there is enough fiat to maintain our stated goals in reserves, and secondly, we will then expand our operations to cover a wider scope.

4. Please explain details of the independent oversight you will have in place to evaluate your performance.

NEM Foundation Oversight:

If the proposal is approved, we will be engaging an external auditor to provide oversight on our finances.

We will be making public our KPIs for the community to provide oversight on our goals and roadmaps.

Oversight on our service providers - NEM Foundation is seeking to contract many projects to third-party companies known as service providers in the NEM ecosystem. We believe this helps to onboard developer companies into the ecosystem that will be more likely to be a part of other projects:

Any contracts that were given to third-party companies will be going through a process of having the project announced via the forums and different companies can ask follow up questions and send in proposals. In the end, we will post which company has won the contract - this will be a form of oversight.

The community will have full transparency where we are spending money. For work that is done internally and contributed by the NEM Foundation, we have a strict policy that all work must be open source and submitted to the PMC. So again, it will be transparent what work is being done by the NEM Foundation in house devs.

5. How are you planning to adapt to changing market conditions and evolving priorities with an annual funding cycle? Would it be beneficial to be more agile and request funding from an independent oversight committee more regularly (e.g. monthly or quarterly)?

We plan to adapt to the changing conditions and evolving priorities by keeping all funds secure in the Singapore entity and only release on a monthly/quarterly basis based on market conditions. There is a need to have control via an annual funding cycle because terms for professionals are in 1 year contracts, it will be difficult to communicate to team members that they have monthly or quarterly reviews where their jobs/remuneration where there could be a risk that funding might not be disbursed.

Section 3 - Philosophy

1. What is your vision for NEM and how do you hope to achieve it?

VISION: Be the onramp for the global economy through the principles of decentralization and tokenization.

We exist to serve and support the best interest of the NEM community. See our community best interest policy here.

Responsiveness

We do our best to communicate often and in a timely manner.

Respect

We respect the work and effort of our team members. We respect the NEM blockchain, the developers behind it and the community.

Unity

We believe that unity is key to the success of teams. We believe in forging unity through a continuous feedback process,

Professionalism

We aim to be professional in all our dealings. See our Code of Ethics and Conflict of Interest Policy here.

Developer Support

The core devs have work for NEM since Q1 2014. This new Foundation acknowledges their grit and commitment and would like to be as committed to serving main dev needs as the developers have been support NEM’s needs.

3. Where do you see your organization in 2 years? 5 years?

2 year goal:

Growing the developer community through engagement

Focus on deepening our open sourced ecosystem growth through the Project Management Committee (PMC), Special Interest Groups (SIGs), and Service Integrators.

Thank you for your response! This is a sound and serious plan that seems to me intended to hold the foundation to a wholly different level of accountability and transparency. I will be eagerly awaiting what this holds for NEM future- this is what we needed from the beginning of NEM- better late than never.

Thanks @nzminer, @okj, @teuthis, @jazzthatway - the council has been working around the clock (literally with all the 7 timezones we are based from) to ensure that NEM Foundation continues on. I would like to emphasise that unity has been a key highlight in the values we carry. We get into very healthy debates and discussions during council meetings but the outcome always leads to unity in decision-making.

Besides that, respect for each other’s work has been a driving point. We respect each other’s effort and bigger than that, we have learned to respect the community who ultimately decides the fate of the Foundation’s future. We also respect the initiative by the NEM EU leadership to initiate the NEM Labs proposal and have jointly agreed between council members and the NEM EU leadership to support each other’s proposal. The history of NEM is still young (in a sense) and let this be a defining milestone to remember for years to come.